James Finley on Contemplation and Awakening

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is James Finley, a contemplative practitioner and clinical psychologist. James helps seekers who

desire to live a contemplative whole life. He draws from his experience as a former monk and spiritual director of Thomas Merton. Today, him and Eric discuss many of his works and concepts. Hi Jim welcome to the show. Thank you, glad we can do this. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really glad to have you on. We're going to talk about um some of your books in the contemplative Christian tradition. But before we do that, let's start with the paragle, like we always do. There is a grandfather who's talking

with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represent and things like kindness, bravery, and love? And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says that the one

you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. For me. A simple direct way to begin with me to say that how I feed the good wolf is in each situation, I try to ask myself, all things considered, what's the most loving thing I can do right now for myself, for the gift of my body? The gift of my mind for this person, this relationship, this family, this community, really,

this plant, this animal, the earth sustains us all. And so I would say that it's love that feeds the good wolf. And I tried to let that be the place where I check in with myself, to stay on that pass. That's a really good and simple question, although the answers may not always be immediately simple, but it's

a pretty good grounding question, it is. Yeah, So you and I are going to talk about a variety of topics, but we're going to talk about a book you wrote called Merton's Palace of Nowhere, which is based on your experience of working with Thomas Merton and you know, knowing his readings and his his life really well. So let's start by For people who don't know who Thomas Murton is, tell us a little bit about who he was. Thomas Merton was born I think in nineteen fifteen in France.

His father was an artist, and the mother and father both died of cancer when he was young, and he went to Cambridge University for one year and it was very suspicious of anything religious basically, who might say, and there were rumors he got to grow pregnant woman pregnant there during the war, and he was drinking too much, and so people concerned about him send him to New York where people could keep a closer eye on him, and he went to Columbia University, and at Columbia University

had a series of spiritual experiences that led him to want to be baptized in the Catholic Church, and he was considering for a while working with Dorothy Day the Catholic Worker movement. He was considering for a while joining the Franciscans, and then he decided to enter the Trappist monastery, this cloistered Trappist monastery, the Abbey of g Semite, to live as a cloistered monk. And when he got into the monastery, I think twenty eight years old is when

he entered. He wrote his um autobiography called The Seventh Story Mountain, and it went on the New York Times bestsellers list, and he became known through that book as a source of hope in the world. He went on to write many books and became one of the most widely read and widely love spiritual writers of our age.

And he died in Um in nineteen sixty eight. Towards the end of his life in the sixties, he got very interested in inner faith dialogue with the non Christian contemplative traditions, with the Sufi tradition, the Buddhist tradition, the Jewish tradition, and he was an act of dialogue with these people. And through that way he was invited to attend an international conference in Bangkok, Thailand of Christian monastics

with the other religious traditions. And while at that conference, he was electrocuted as Uh nineteen sixty eight December the tenth, nineteen sixty eight, same day Karl Bart died, I think, and Uh, that was fifty three years old. So that's that's kind of a sense of Merton's life. And so tell me how you knew him and what your relationship to him was. When I was I was born in Maison Acron, Ohio, the oldest of six children. My father was a violent abuse of alcoholic and my mother was

a devout Catholic. A lot of the arguments in the home over Catholicism and religion, and so when I was fourteen years old, I was attending this Catholic high school and one of the teachers in the class mentioned monasteries. I'd never heard of monasteries before I mentioned Thomas Merton. And so that day I went after school to the school library and found a book by Merton called The Sign of Jonas, which is a journal he kept as

a monk in the monastery. And on the opening page of that journal he says, asked for me, Merton says of himself, as for me, I have but one desire, the desire for solitude to disappear in the secret of God's face. And if fourteen years old, I did not know what that meant, but something in me did and said me too, like I want that. And when I read that book, I read it over and over and over, and it was clear that the person who wrote this book knew the way to that secret place and God,

and I started writing to the monastery. The violence is still continuing. And my master plan was I was under the monastery, I would be a monk. I would sit at Merton's feet and have him guide me in this path towards this experience of God consciousness, Christ consciousness. And that's what I did. I when I graduated, I i went there and as novice master he was became my

spiritual director. I was there, I was ever nearly six years, and so I came under his influence, first to his writings and then in person as living as a monk in the monastery. And that's how I came under his influence. And you wrote a book that I referenced earlier called Merton's Palace of Nowhere that sort of explores his spiritual life and his approach, and you say Merton's whole spirituality in one way or another, pivots on the question of

ultimate human identity. Merton's message is that we are one with God. Can you elaborate a little bit on on that? I guess one way to say it would be first to bear witness to it ultimately, speaking as a statement of faith, and then to go from there to the ways that we experience that. And I think one way to put it ultimately on what that is, we could

you could put it this way. We could say that if if right now we could be interiorly awakened so that we could see, like realize all that we really, really, really are, we would see God, the infinite reality, the infinite love that is God, pouring itself out and completely giving itself away. As our own deep this identity and our nothingness without God. That is when God creates me, When God creates a person, God creates a cop hoox day, a capacity for God. And so I am subsisting in

a relationship with God like light subsist in flame. And that subsisting relationship of likeness is God given Godly oneness and love is my that's my true self, that's my ultimate identity. That's my God given Godly identity, which is also then my destiny to realize that. And that is

Christian terminology or Catholic terminology. But really Merton and yourself are are part of a deeper tradition of often referred to his mysticism or you know, contemplative practice, and that you know one way of seeing that is you hear a similar experience described in a lot of different traditions. Would you agree with that? Yes? That Merton in the

early sixties um in his own evolving spiritual journey. He was reading the essays of the zen scholar Dti Suzuki, and he wrote a letter to Suzuki, which is in the back of his books. Then in the Birds of Appetite, and he wrote to Suzuki and said, when I read these zen stories of enlightenment, something leaps off the page and me and says, this is true. And I would like to know if I was a Christian could dialogue

with you as a Buddhist about this common ground. Thomas Merton once said, the world will not survive religion based on tribal consciousness. That in the name of religion, Uh, the religious people will be at the forefront of discord. But if those who are truest to what is deepest in their own tradition, which is what transcends their own tradition, if they would bear witness to that religious consciousness could

be a source of unity of the world. And so Tick not Han came to visit him as when he was still in Vietnam before he went to Plumb village in France. The Jewish scholar and mystic Abraham Joshua heschel I came to visit Merton. He carried on a very deep dialogue with the Sufi's with the Muslim mystics. Uh Yogis came from India to be in dialogue with him

about this deep yoga. And so he was one of the Christian monastics who was at the heart of this faith dialogue, of this contemplative mystical depth dimension this found in all world religions. And Merton also saw that same dimension in some poets and in philosophers and artists and those who served the poor, bearing witness to this ultimate mystery that utterly transcends us, even as it utterly permeates every moment of our life. And he was very active

in that dialogue process. Yeah, ironically I came to Merton so many years ago through his writings about Zen. I was interested in Zen and Um, and I found my way to him. That way, That was my path into Thomas Merton. And so he ultimately talks about and this is a term that is used very similarly in in in different Buddhists or non dual schools, but he talks about a true self and a false self. So tell me a little bit about what that means to to him,

but ultimately really to you. Yes, I suppose one way. It's a subtle thing. I mean, reading Merchant. You can reflect on different passages and swan House through the lineage or through this these traditions. But one way to express it would be this. It would be to say that when God create. To use this theistic language Christian tradition that when God created you, God did not have to think of who you might be were from all eternity, God eternally contemplated you hidden with Christ and God from

before the origins of the universe. This is the you that never began. It's the unborn you for God, never never, never, never is not known who you eternally are in God, destined for God. And this you, this identity that God contemplates in God. It's you that will never die. And that and that capacity for God, that God given capacity, which is really an invitation or the capacity to share in God's own infinite life as infinitely as God shares

in that life and and our nothingness without God. That's that's our true self. Then God endows that person, the person identity with the nature, our human nature, and the glory of our human nature. The most sublime quality of our human nature is not reason, as the immensity of that and all of its implications for for reason, science and all of that, the most sublime capacity of human

nature is to awaken to the person. And so Merton says that in our nature and our ego, we come upon within our ego, what transcends our ego, and so he says in his closing chapters of New Season Contemplation, he says, we do not have to go very far to catch echoes or glimpses of this oneness. He says, when we see, when we turn to see a flock of birds descending, where we know love in our own heart, where we see children in a moment, they're really children.

Like the zen poet Bashow, we hear a frog land in a quiet pond with the solitary splash. He said that the newness, the purity of vision, the turning inside out of all values, gives us a glimpse of this unity, miss tree, this one life that is at once God's in our own, and that inner awakening. He saw them to be the like the deepest expression of our nature and then an awakening to it. Because love is never imposed,

it's always offered. Were to freely assent to that, that is, we're freely to give ourselves in love to the love that gives itself to us is our deepest identity. And I was saying kind of poetic language that would be a way to kind of set a tone for the true self and the moments in which we realize it. And Merton goes on to equate the false self to sin, and he says, to say I was born in sin is to say I came into the world with a false self. I was born in a mask the false self.

I think a distinction that is very helpful with this. The is the ego, how Merton saw the ego, which he sometimes calls the external self or it's the self. Our personality is the self that kind of form through genetic predis positions and internalizing experiences and so on, that our ego, in this kind of way of looking at things. God wants us to have a healthy ego, because if our ego is unhealthy, we suffer, and other people suffer. A lot of mental health is devoted to the healing

of the woundedness of the ego. So the false self is not the ego. The false self is an illusion that the ego harbors about itself, namely that it has the final say in who we are, That we are nothing but our internalized beliefs and convictions and strategies and goals and attainments that were nothing but that that that illusion which is to be exiled from this abysslike ground

of our identity in God. That estrangement he calls the false self, which we then act out upon ourselves and others by the ways of other traumatizing ways we treat ourselves and others in the earth. And so that's what he means by the false self. He goes on to talk about that. He says, the folk because of sin is shifted from the realm of morality to that of ontology, which is being for Merton, the matter of who we always are proceeds what we do. Thus, sin is not

essentially an action, but rather an identity. But for a long time I was a clinical psychologist, I work with trauma, and I went through my own trauma therapy and about identity, and see, I'd put it this way. This might be one way to say it is that what we're talking about in the discovery of the true self is the process of dying to our dreaded and cherished illusion that anything less than an infinite union with infinite love has

the authority to name who we are. That there is a certain kind of of of a felt perception about ourselves, this self, this autonomous and separate and real all on its own it has to try to navigate and make its way through the world on his own terms. He's calling that case of mistaken identity. Kind of the ontological foundations of this is which the Buddhists called ignorance and Jesus called blindness. So the moral order, the sinful and namely the acts that hurt herself and others, is the

acting out of that mistaken identity. You wrote a book called The Contemplative Heart, So tell me a little bit about what is contemplation to you. Contemplation is I think I put it this way, is you know, first, to contemplate means to pay attention, to observe carefully. So for example, we pause to contemplate something that catches our eye, say a flower in the garden, where we pause to hear

the sound of the rain. Where you see people in an art museum pausing before each piece, and so there's contemplation is in one sense and a state of sustained attentiveness. It's a state of a state of awareness in which all our discursive thoughts tend to fall into the background, and there tends to be the sustained attentiveness infused with love. If I abide in that it is. If I stay in that state, it brings about a qualitative transformation of

my deepest sense of my own subjectivity. I kind of dropped down into a qualitatively deeper sense of myself, unexplainably one with the beauty and the mystery of that which I'm contemplating. That deep depth, we would say, then is

really an abyss. It's a bottomless abyss, and we begin to make our descent into this bottomless abyss of God welling up and giving itself to us as the virginal immediacy of that moment, like in the arms of the beloved, or reading a childhood night's story, or up in the night, or sitting in it, whatever it is, the pause between two lines of a poem, whatever that opening is to

the deeper place. A contemplation is first an event. But then we can choose to sustain that, which is if, just as a meditative practice, we can choose to sustain the stance of habituating ever deeper, habituated states of oneness of that mystery. And so contemplative prayer is a practice. I don't like that word, so I'm gonna use it

just to start right. You actually say a contemplate practices, any act habitually entered into with your whole heart as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience. But one of the things that you often talk about and Merton did, and how almost impossible this is, you say, in solitary prayer, we find ourselves facing the dilemma of

having to do what we are incapable of doing. Let's say we would begin first with one of these moments of awakening, these kind of inner quickenings that happen that kind of wash over us, like turning to see a flock of birds descending, or a moment of intimacy with another person, or poetry or whatever, these whatever the realm is in which the deepening event happens in that deepening moment, in that inner quickening of momentary. We might say we're

a momentary mystic. It doesn't lie in our power to sustain it, that is, it doesn't lie in our power to make it happen. But what we can do is if we can freely choose to assume the stance that offers the least resistance to be overtaken by what we cannot attain, it attains us and our powerlessness to attain it.

And that's meditation practice. So meditation the Christian tradition. One of the books that I wrote called Christian Meditation, there's a chapter and called a Ladder to Heaven, and it's this classical then one finds in the tradition that begins with it with alexeio da vina, like this, listening to a word that's heard and even before you think about it, you immediately recognize that it's beautiful, and it's beautiful because

it's true. So it's a stance of and then that stands of receiving that word evokes a dialogue from us, which is discursive meditation. It's like a loving, prayerful exchange between ourselves and God through a text and scripture or a poet whose ever voice said is it resonates with us in this way. And then that that lexio and that response and meditation gives rise to prayer, which is the love response of the heart center, like help me

with this. That process, that diological discursive process can give rise to a moment where we find ourselfs resting wordlessly in the presence of God, beyond thoughts and images. And

I think this happens in human intimacy too. There are certain moments between two people who are lovingly sharing in a very vulnerable way their love for each other, and this loving exchange back and forth with each other opens out a moment where they're kind of silenced by the depth of the love in which they are one, and forwards they can find no words, in which case then

the relationship becomes meditation for two. They're in a meditative state of realizing together the divinity of the incarnate intimacy of their love for one another. I love what you just said in there about it's taking the stance of least resistance. You know, we're told particularly and then that you're just supposed to sit. That's it, right, And we realize that we can't do that, But we can do many things. We can, you know, sit and sleep and

thinking all sorts of stuff. But Siti is beyond us, right, and that ultimately awakening is is a matter of something happens to us. We can't make it happen. And and my experience has been sometimes the more I'm trying to make it happen, the more I stand in my own way. But I love that idea of a posture of least resistance. It's another way of explaining what I often say, which is,

how do you try not to try exactly? But see I wonder if to Like a couple of years, I was invited a chocoln Trump or Impuchet to be one of the Christian teachers at Europa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and which is also I got in touch with sounds true. Also Tammy Simon sounds true because they're there Boulder and the talks there with these these Buddhists and Christian teachers.

It really one of the things that came out in this in this exchange was that that people who are faithful to meditation actice are not people who know how to meditate, but rather there are people who sit deeply in their inability to meditate. If I meditate, meaning they can achieve through sheer effort of their will, the sustained meditative state, because the only thing the ego can achieve is more of itself. But if I come to the impasse where I can't go on, I do not how

to go on. But instead of stopping and running away, I place my trust in the mystery that unexplainably sustains me in my inability to meditate. And if I sit there, whatever my tradition is, it might be a word, or might be bare attention jakantaza, or it might be contempt that that stands a sustained vulnerability, trusting that I'm being unexplainably sustained. I would say, you know, it's really was unexplainably given in the miracle of each breath and heartbeat.

Martin says, the most important thing in your life is something thing that you don't understand and don't need to understand, because God loves you. This happens in therapy too. It often walls up out a powerlessness where we don't know how to go on, and it's very risky. But if we don't panic, and we keep our balance, we can discover that there is the welling up out of the brokenness itself, that which unexplainably sustains us in the brokenness.

And uh, I think meditation is a kind of artistry, of kind of gently practicing that radical vulnerability and where the unit of consciousness happens. Yeah. I had a teacher once in discussing this matter of the will. He said, the will is useful to get you to a place of sitting down to meditate and then and then it's not really of any use at that point. Certain people are accident prone right by putting themselves in a position. Merton once told you to quit trying so hard in prayer, right,

he said, how does an apple ripen? It just sits in the sun. And by the way, it's interesting about monastic life and Buddhism. All the monastic traditions are this way. Really, it's very strange in a way because what it does is a it's a tradition of attrition, not addition. That's what it does is it removes complexities and distractions and you're left to live in silence in the ordinariness of

the human experience prayer and work. So there's rhythm of the psalms and manual labor in silence, and you kind of settled down into this deep kind of being present to yourself as unexplainably precious in your brokenness, and you

know you're kind of let along that path. I'll tell you a story I share with people on the and the talks that give on Marten on what we're talking about right now, is that I say, imagined There's a woman who marries a psychologist, and on the twenty five wedding anniversary, he gives her a book that he's been secretly writing about her over all those years, And when she lifts the heavy tone from the box, she says, with pride in his voice, if you look in the

back there, you'll see you're completely indexed. So anything you want to know about yourself, you can look yourself up. And tears come to orise, and she throws the book down, and she's so upset, and he's crestfallen because he's already secretly begun work on their golden anniversary present, which is a three volume work called US cross Reference with the

U volume. That is, the heart. Knowledge of intimacy is not achieved by the sum total of internalizing facts, is rather as achieving a transformative process, surrendering to the gift in the miracle of what love asked about out of us, or the way love is translating us into itself, that using of our intellect as the tool that we think gets us there. I mean, I was this way for a long time. I would much rather well, I'm still

this way. I have to work against it. I'd much rather read about spirituality than i'd sit down and actually sit quietly and profess it like it's it's a far easier thing for me to do. To sit there is

way harder. And so I've been recently doing a little bit of coon study with with a teacher, and it's very intention is to undercut that entire process of intellect, and it's it's just a new type of practice I hadn't really done before, and I'm finding interesting to see what happens when I deliberately try not to solve something that i'm social also trying to solve. That's really true. It means, of course that the conceptual mind has its role,

of course, up to that. Another thing I think is very significant about these mystic teachers, whether it's Koons or Suitrus or Christian mystic scripture understood at this level, is it then, in that breakthrough into that wordless state, the mystic teacher is the one who uses words in the

service of the unexplainable. That is, the mystic teacher is the person whose words bear witness to this zem Ester Dogan says, find that person whose words awaken your heart with the desire for the great way to forget everything else, and so they bear witness to it, and then they offer trustworthy guidance in it. And so then they use language in the service of helping a person to let go of their dependency on the kind of language, to stop short at explanations, to find the language as kind

of a cry from the heart. The language is the expression of our or our true self with the dharma or christ consciousness and so on. That's a beautiful way to say it. One of the other things that Merton talks about is this paradox that in solitude he rediscovered the heart of the world. You wrote, it is the paradox that true solitude draws us into communion with others, and true communion with others draws us to solitude. And you say that the monks of vocation was to find

others in solitude. The vocation of people in the world is to find solitude in the midst of others. The true self embraces both solitude and others. Yeah, let's say, in the light of this talk we're having right now, for example, let's say that I'm learning to live in this unexplainable intimate immediacy of myself and my poverty, unexplainably sustained as precious in my poverty, and and I get I have this experiential self knowledge is humility. I live

in this experiential self knowledge. The more I deepen that experiential self knowledge, the more I know you, because each one of us is a unique addition of the universal story of being a human being. And so the more I sit and listen to you out of the depths of my own intimate unfolding, the more I can quietly listen to you and join you in your way of expressing that vulnerability, and we can kind of meet each other.

I know, like the interconnectedness of all of us in this interior enigmatic richness and poverty, of the depths of the mystery of being a human being, which then, in the Christian tradition, becomes the basis for the corporal works

of mercy or for social justice. Once I see the dignity of the human person, that we're each worth all that God is worth, then that moves us or even impels us to respond to wherever there is injustice, where any human being is being treated um in any way less than they just or to be treated as a precious presence in the world. So, Jim, how does that apply to what we were talking before about this idea of not being able to make effort. Let's say it

applies in this way. Let's say that solitude is the experience of being less and less able to explain to anybody, including ourselves, what's happening to us, or to explain to anybody, including ourselves, this desire to reach this realized unity of state. And we sit in meditation therefore, in that kind of solitude, of the inability to adequately articulate the unconsummated longings, that moves us to continue on in our meditative practice. And what we find in the practice is that we come

up against the arduous nature of it all. It has an arduous quality to it. One of the things that helps me like an image for this this is deeply Christian, as God's mercy, and then in Buddhism, as compassion is the body of emptiness. Is that I say, sometimes we think that meditation practice realizing this unit of state. I compare it to like a high jumper, Olympic high jumper trying to jump over a very high bar, and the bar is so high we exhaust ourselves repeatedly running up

to it, trying to jump over it. We cannot jump over it. And when we've exhausted ourselves, when we spend ourselves in this effort that we can't do it, an amazing thing happens. Compassion steps out, takes the bar in, places it flat on the ground, and approaching the bar, bewildered as to the simplicity of the task, we trip over it and fall into God's arms where we trip over it and we fall into the pure dharma field that the Buddha realized on the night of the Enlightenment,

intimate immediacy of the divinity of the phenomenal world. So it comes about actually in coming to the end of our resources, and then in the very end of the resources, in that very point of poverty, and then staying there. That's where that would infinitely be honest, comes rushing through the opening of our poverty and grants itself to us. And I think that kind of imagery helps to understand in Buddhism, like right effort, what is this effective effort

in awakening? How are you using that word poverty? I mean one in the deepest sense that it just as it doesn't lie within my power to bring myself in existence. It doesn't lie in my power to keep myself in existence. To be at the death bed of a dying loved one is tangibly clear that our next breath does not belong to us. Lest we be presumptuous that my life arises moment by moment, by moment by moment as a gift in a miracle in the virginal media you see

at the present moment. That's that deep poverty. Poverty has also expressed. Thomas Merton once said, we should all get done on our knees right now, and thank God, we can't live the way we want to. God doesn't let us get away with it. Our poverty is our inability to rise to the occasion of our own ideals, of our own aspirations, of the should that we're trying. And by the way, then we tend to do the same

thing with other people. We impose that on them. And so my poverty, as I come to this acceptance of my poverty, there's a noble aspiration, and I come to the poverty of my ability to actualize that aspiration. And if I said very deeply in the acceptance of my poverty to make it happen on my terms, it can unexplainably start to happen on God's terms, like a mysterious granting, a mysterious kind of light that shines so brightly in the very darkness in which I had lost my way.

And I think this happens in marriages, this happens in parenting. Anything real has this quality where if we if we let it, it sifts us like wheat, and it brings us to the end of our resources, and we learn to open ourselves to being unexplainably sustained by a mystery within and beyond ourselves that takes us to itself. And I think that's wisdom. Really, I think that's one we have understanding wisdom. Well, that is beautifully said in a

beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation about a quote of yours that I want to discuss, and the quote is the depths of the self are the heights of God. So you and

I are going to discuss that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you are interested in that, you can become a member by going to one you feed dot net slash join, you get access to all the post show conversations, add free episodes, and a special mini episode I do every week call the teaching song and a poem and usually a dumb joke. So when you feed dot net slash Join, Jim, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you, and I really enjoyed

reading your work, so thank you. I want to thank you also for inviting me to do this, and it feels such a kinship with you and this ministry of trying to offer this to the world and help other people. So I'm glad we could do this than yes, I feel the same. Thank you. Okay bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to The One You Feed podcast. Head over to

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